The earnest gypsy

"Oh, I hope I am not that!" Gwendolen returns. "It would leave no room for developments, and I hope to develop in many directions."

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In Oliver Parker's new film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, a sartorially resplendent Frances O'Connor delivers the exchange. Even were he trying to resist - which he isn't - Jack wouldn't stand a chance.

"There's a kind of wickedness, a puckishness to (O'Connor) that I think works fantastically well," Colin Firth, who plays Jack Worthing, says of his co-star. "I think she made the character of Gwendolen very sexy and very sophisticated."

O'Connor says: "The original version had a slight stiffness to it that is kind of written into the part. I wanted to find a way of making her a little more sensual and kind of flirty and life-embracing."

Oscar Wilde was being deeply satirical but O'Connor sees more than a grain of truth to a woman knowing what she wants and going after it. "It makes for a good set-up, that's for sure."

Gwendolen's a woman, after all, who will love nobody who is not named Ernest, even cementing her devotion to the name - and her man - by visiting a tattoo parlour.

Parker's departures from the play's original text - tattoos! - have earned some heat from Wilde purists, but O'Connor deflects such criticism.

"As Oscar Wilde says, 'Better to be spoken of badly rather than not to be spoken of at all'," she says.

There's little risk of either circumstance befalling the 33-year-old O'Connor. Since completing Earnest, she has performed a five-month stint in the West End in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opposite Brendan Fraser.

She also plays a nurse who tends to a wounded Nicolas Cage in John Woo's Windtalkers. Given the mayhem Woo (Mission: Impossible 2, Face/Off) usually puts his actors through, O'Connor was almost sorry to be left in relative calm.

"I told John, 'I'm very disappointed. I don't even get to hold a pistol or anything'," she says, laughing. "He promised me, next time."

Presently based in Montreal where she's shooting Timeline, a Richard Donner-directed sci-fi yarn about time-travelling archaeologists, the pace seems to suit her down to the ground.

"It's that gypsy lifestyle thing and I'm addicted to it," she says. "I love it. For some people it's very hard, but it really suits my nature for some reason. Travelling around from place to place, having different experiences all the time, it's great."

O'Connor, in New York to promote Earnest, has an aristocratic forehead, plaintive brown eyes and a friendly smile, which she uses as a full-stop for her succinct answers. In interviews she is guarded, concise and careful.

She can also be a little unnerving for American interviewers who expect Australian actresses to be pretty, cheerful and irreverent.

"I've been told I'm reserved," O'Connor says.

Certainly her boyfriend of eight years, actor-writer Gerald Lepkowski, is normally off limits, but today she muses about the difficulties of sustaining a relationship that involves a lot of time apart.

"We've managed to make it work for quite a few years now, first in Melbourne and then in London, but it's really hard," she says. "It's even harder, I suspect, when you've got someone in the same business who is doing what you're doing, with different schedules. It can be quite lonely. We talk on the phone every day."

O'Connor was born in Oxford, England, where her father, a nuclear physicist, was undertaking his PhD. The family returned to Australia when she was two. She grew up the third of five siblings, all spaced respectably apart, "like a good Catholic family".

"I remember being dragged away every Sunday from watching TV and being made to go to church," she says. "I just quietly did my own thing and then I went into acting - the last thing my parents would have wanted, I think, because it seemed frivolous and not a guarantee of gainful employment."

The movies that mesmerised the young O'Connor were old black-and-white films and musicals, and she remembers writing in her diary as a 15-year-old: "I've decided I'm going to be an actress and I am going to keep it secret and not tell mum and dad."

After university she spent a year teaching English in Japan, and then enrolled at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). During her final year at WAAPA, she was spotted by the then director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, Roger Hodgman, and moved east.

By the mid-1990s, she had branched out into movies - Love and Other Catastrophes, Thank God He Met Lizzie, Kiss or Kill and A Little Bit of Soul.

When Lizzie was shown at Cannes, O'Connor was snapped up by an international agent, and she was back in Melbourne when the offer of the lead role of Fanny Price in Patricia Rozema's unconventional reworking of Mansfield Park came along.

Timeline's Donner is Mel Gibson's favourite director, but any notion of a "gumleaf mafia" operating in Hollywood is inaccurate, says O'Connor.

"My feeling about the success of Australian actresses in Hollywood is that there is a certain strength to the women who are around at the moment. Strong women are kind of a tradition in Australian society and these days, speaking your mind is fairly natural. I mean, it's not considered bad form."

O'Connor's performance in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof was widely praised, and it seemed the London critics hadn't been as excited by an Australian stage appearance since Nicole Kidman did "pure theatrical Viagra" in The Blue Room. "Superbly pent-up," said The Independent of O'Connor's star turn. "Exactly the right feline sexiness," said The Guardian.

"It was wonderful but I think it was probably the hardest thing I've ever done," she says. "I was going to do it in New York but, after five months, I was finding it incredibly hard yakka. The reality is that I would have ended up doing it for a year. My character is so intense and so has a slightly aggressive streak to her. So you're in that energy and you're up until about 3am, not going out partying, but just winding down and having a cup of tea."

O'Connor went into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof just after finishing Windtalkers, in which she plays a small but significant role.

Woo says of his decision to cast O'Connor: "This is a movie with so much ugliness, so I wanted someone really beautiful. She always looks ravishing in period films."

She played the adulterous Emma Bovary and while Earnest again sees her in gloves and crinoline, O'Connor has ventured far from period dramas with roles in Bedazzled and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. The latter didn't quite measure up to critical or box-office expectations, but O'Connor is pleased because it placed her in director Steven Spielberg's orbit.

"It's just great working with people who challenge me, with people who are really on top of their game," says O'Connor. "I think that's important."

Earnest's writer-director Parker, meanwhile, has nothing but praise for her. "You could throw anything at Frances and she'd catch it," he says.